The Black Sea – cultural, literary and linguistic landscape

The Black Sea is a subject of interest not only for geographers, botanists, zoologists or historians. For ages the Black Sea area has been fascinating literary, cultural or linguistic experts both in contemporary and old languages. A sound of the hydronym Black Sea evokes a lot of associations which make a space for individual and group cultural memory. The Black Sea region abounds in numerous legends, beliefs, records of ancient thinkers or finally in research explorations presenting centuries-long and multi-cultural mosaic of meanings. In the basin of the Balack Sea, on the territory of present-day Bulgaria and Romania, we can find traces of Thracian, Byzantine, Roman or Ottoman civilisations that had a huge influence on the contemporary landscape of the region. Moreover, for ages in the basin of the Black Sea empires have been clashing and various inequalities between coastal states have been appearing, resulting from the history of adversities and contrasts. In the foreword to the book Odessa Transfer. Reports from the Black Sea Katharina Raabe lists distinguishing marks of the Black Sea city on the example of Odessa: “steppe and sea, «barbarity» and «civilisation», Orient and Occident, Asia and Europe”. These “marks” are only several obvious clues, permanently inherent in the Black Sea landscape which opens up to new interpretations strengthening or deconstructing superstitions and imaginations. We suggest to focus research explorations on such problematic areas (representing linguistics, ethnology, literary studies, cultural studies and widely understood art of the Slavdom in the Black Sea basin) as:

  • cultural and inter-cultural landscape;
  • literary landscape;
  • urban and non-urban landscape, including literary spaces of cities, villages, regions of the Black Sea;
  • Romantic landscape;
  • linguistic landscape (perceived as all linguistic and/or linguistic-geographical signs found in an urban space) and onomastics (names, surnames, geographical and company terms) of the Slavdom in the Black Sea area;
  • artistic, architectural and cinema landscape in the Slavonic spaces;
  • historical and political landscape of the Black Sea areas, and its impact on contemporary ethnological and cultural conditions;
  • natural landscape – flora and fauna of the Black Sea in cultural, literary or linguistic aspects; marine landscape;
  • non-Slavonic landscape of the Black Sea as the context for the Slavdom (i.a. Balkan, Greek, Turkish, Caucasian, etc. influences).

 Please send your papers (up to 30.000 characters including spaces) in Slavonic, English and other congress languages by the 30th of November 2023 via the website of the periodical “Poznań Slavonic Studies” (“Poznańskie Studia Slawistyczne”) on the platform Pressto (https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/pss/about/submissions). You can find editorial guidelines for authors on the platform Pressto. Your artickle should be supplemented with author’s ORCID number, e-mail address, abstract both in English and a language of your paper (about 700 characters), key words both in English and a language of your paper, and a short note about the author in English (up to 700 characters).

Please confirm your participation in this volume by the 30th of June 2023.

 

The thematic editors of the issue: Patryk P. Borowiak